Friday Feelings

Emotional. Anything family orientated has been setting me off this evening. A warm moment between father and son, to the horror and agony of watching Jaycee Lee Duggard's tale of captivity. We have a friend coming to stay tomorrow and while that's nice it means my parents won't be coming to stay. And I want to see them so desperately but I can't. I just can't step foot in that house again. And I can't express how much that shreds my heart to pieces. Especially when you hear your father on the phone expressing his sorrow for ruining your life. Which isn't the case, no matter what went down between us. I stand here today in this condition because of the choices I made. No one else.
And that's not to say I wasn't angry with my father for a long time. I was. It doesn't mean that anger was justified though. It simply blinded me to the truth of the situation. Which is my parents are two very broken people, who did their best for us. There was never any malice behind their actions, they didn't want to hurt us, they wanted to protect us. But we ended up hurt anyway and that's not something that can be erased.
But I don't want to spend my life focusing on the past and assigning blame because where will it get any of us. What I want is to have a real and honest relationship with my parents. My Mum and me are very close. She's easy to talk to and the week we spent together while my brother and father where away on holiday was great, laid back and fun.
It doesn't work that way with my Dad. There's so much distance between us. I never know what to say around him. There's just not that ease that's there between me and Mum. He keeps everything so bottled up, you're never sure what he's thinking or feeling at any given moment. And I have to be honest there's still a part of me that's just that scared little girl. He was never physical with us bar one or two regrettable situations, it was mostly verbal abuse and just a quiet distance. He was never really there with us. He's always seemed like he's somewhere else, you can just see it in his eyes. And work was hard, gruelling and demoralising at times, with a boss that loved to push his buttons. So he coped with it the only way he knew how, he'd go get a drink or he'd come home and zone out in front of the TV. Can't blame him for wanting an escape.
So there was always this quiet angst hanging in the air. We walked on egg shells at times when work was making him noticeably agitated. And even after years of redundancy he can still have a temper flare once in a blue moon.
So it can be hard to know when the best time to talk to him is. When will you get his full attention and make sure that he's not distracted or irritated and just not in the mood to talk.  And i guess I unjustifiably worry about his reaction to more personal topics. Especially those pertaining to my treatment. Currently keeping it to myself that I have to go for an ECG because of my anti-depressant. Its completely routine and I don't expect any problems but my Dad has always been a worrier and it would just set him off panicking about nothing. And there's a possibility he might tell me to quit taking my tablets. He has once before instructed my Mum to throw them out when I lived at home when he saw an unflattering piece on anti-depressants on television. He's never been very pro meds anyway. Well he's not very pro any kind of therapy but he'd never try to talk us out of what we think we need. He only wants to see us happy. And I know that and love that about him. I just wish I knew a way in. I don't want to look back in years to come and wish I'd taken more chances and tried harder. It'll kill me if we can't reach a better place, especially if god forbid something happened and he passed before his time. I know me. It'd eat away at me for the rest of my life. Because that's just who I am and I don't think that's ever going to change. Not significantly at least.